In today's environment, a computing system often includes several components, such as servers, hard drives, and other peripheral devices. These components are generally stored in racks. For a large company, the storage racks can number in the hundreds and occupy huge amounts of floor space. Also, because the components are generally free standing components, i.e., they are not integrated, resources such as floppy drives, keyboards and monitors, cannot be shared.
A system has been developed by International Business Machines Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., that bundles the computing system described above into a compact operational unit. The system is known as an IBM eServer BladeCenter.™ The BladeCenter is a 7U modular chassis that is capable of housing up to 14 individual server blades. A server blade or blade is a computer component that provides the processor, memory, hard disk storage and firmware of an industry standard server. Each blade can be “hot-plugged” into a slot in the chassis. The chassis also houses supporting resources such as power, switch, management and blower modules. Thus, the chassis allows the individual blades to share the supporting resources.
In a dense server environment, multiple BladeCenter type products can be utilized. Because the server blades are highly mobile, i.e., they are easily removed from a chassis and easily reinstalled into the same or another chassis, there is a possibility that an unauthorized or hostile server blade can be placed in a chassis. In that case, the hostile server blade could have access to information on the other server blades in the chassis or be privy to information distributed to the authorized server blades in the chassis. Moreover, the hostile server blade could corrupt the other server blades, e.g., by introducing viruses into the system. Clearly, this raises serious security concerns.
Accordingly, a need exists for a method for securely interlocking servers to their respective server systems. The method should be able to detect and isolate a non-interlocked, i.e., unauthorized, server in the server system. The present invention addresses such a need.